 |
|
Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume 4
Fall 2005
By Frankie Dintino
Tyler 's house is a dilapidated two-story Victorian building on the aptly named " Paper Street ." Tyler and Jack regularly return to the parking lot outside the bar, and their masochistic ballet begins to attract spectators. Eventually someone asks if he can have the next fight, and what was previously a two-man operation becomes a group activity. The club moves underground (literally), and on a weekly basis men from various professions and backgrounds meet to beat the proverbial pulp out of each other, escaping through the primitive flows that traverse their bodies in a veritable theatre of cruelty. The revolutionary character of the club is introduced innocently enough, with the distribution of "assignments" thought up by Tyler to the members. These assignments are basically exercises in "culture jamming." Eventually, they escalate in severity, and soon people are moving into the house on Paper Street to join "Project Mayhem," the destructive revolutionary organization into which the club has devolved. Almost overnight the house is transformed into an organism, as Jack notes: "The house became a living thing, wet inside from so many people sweating and breathing." Jack is astonished by the level of organization and clockwork-like motion of the house. Files labeled "mischief," "arson," and "disinformation" line the walls, and everywhere people are working diligently at some task, whether it be creating nitroglycerine or indoctrinating new "space monkeys" into the project. When a friend of Jack's, Bob, is killed by an officer while committing an act of arson, Jack is struck with disbelief at the callous reaction of the space monkeys, who merely state "he was killed serving Project Mayhem, sir." Jack explains that Bob is a person with a name, and that name is Robert Paulson. When the group starts chanting "his name was Robert Paulson," Jack becomes aware that Project Mayhem has spun wildly out of control, and he becomes intent on ending it. Jack runs to the upstairs bedroom and, searching through the drawers, he discovers various ticket stubs addressed to Tyler Durden. He grabs them all and sets off tracing Tyler 's footsteps, "following an invisible man." In each city he finds evidence of a fight club. As all of this is happening, the most surprising twist of the film is revealed when it becomes obvious that Jack is schizophrenic - not in the clinical sense, but in the Hollywood sense of the word. That is to say, Tyler is a mere figment of Jack's imagination; they are the same person. Jack's mission to put an end to Project Mayhem thus becomes a fight against himself.
The whole chain of events that makes up the second half of the film lends itself to three concepts (or plateaus) found in Deleuze and Guattari: regimes of signs and subjectification, micropolitics, and cruelty. I will explain and analyze each of these angles in turn. First, however, it is necessary to take a brief foray into a discussion of method and terminology in Deleuze and Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari's overarching project might best be characterized as geological. That is, they analyze linguistics, biology, and society as constituted by strata. Here "strata" is borrowed from the geological term which indicates the layers of the earth, each composed of relatively homogenous material. Obviously Deleuze and Guattari are using it in a more general and conceptual sense, and by stratification they mean the most basic agent of what we see as organization or order. As Manuel Delanda explains "from the point of view of energetic and catalytic flows, human societies are very much like lava flows; and human-made structures (mineralized cities and institutions) are very much like mountains and rocks: accumulations of materials hardened and shaped by historical processes" ( A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History 55). Thus, Jack's initial relationships with his job or with his furniture serve as stratifying elements in his life or subjectivity. Conversely, Jack's relationship with Tyler Durden serves as a destratifying element in the same, in that it destroys Jack's various connections with society. Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari describe assemblages, which are essentially relationships of strata that map onto a territory ( A Thousand Plateaus 503-04). The territory indicated here relates to the notion of a "ground," in the broad sense. Hence, Jack's subjectification is connected to an assemblage, that is, a certain combination of the various organizing and ordering forces that make up Jack, along with the way in which this combination relates to grounds or territories (power). For example, Jack variously grounds his subjectification in his career, in hope, or in support-groups; each of these are elements of an assemblage. Lastly, Deleuze and Guattari enumerate the types of lines which make up these assemblages and strata, which can be either molar, molecular, or lines of flight. Molar and molecular here are not correlates of size, but rather are respectively on the order of statistical aggregates and multiplicities. To give an example, the various confinements of a discipline society are molar, in that they are relationships of power based on molds: "first of all the family, then school ('you're not at home, you know'), then the barracks ('you're not at school, you know'), then the factory, hospital from time to time, maybe prison" (Deleuze Negotiations 177. Conversely, the confinements of a control society, like Jack's, are more molecular, since they lack a set mold but are no less powerful: "You are not your job . . . you are not how much money you have in the bank . . . not the car you drive . . . not the contents of your wallet" (Fincher). While molecular and molar lines are stratifying, lines of flight are destratifying ¾ that is, they are movements outside or between the strata. In simpler terms, they are escapes from the codes and assemblages which organize our lives. To give a particularly relevant example from the film, the destruction of Jack's commercial identity (his wardrobe, apartment, and furniture) sets his trajectory on a line of flight from capitalism.